


Accidents Happen

by metisket



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga, The Dresden Files - Jim Butcher
Genre: Crossover, Don't Try This At Home, Gen, doom magnet, must be tuesday, or anywhere else, saving the day with explosives, trust me i'm a wizard
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-16
Updated: 2016-07-16
Packaged: 2018-07-24 08:02:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 13,957
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7500444
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/metisket/pseuds/metisket
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s not so much the strange children falling from the sky that are worrying Harry. It’s more that the children don’t seem to think the situation is all that weird.</p>
<p>
  <i>“No matter where I go,” Ed said thoughtfully, “there’s a goddamn pyromaniac there waiting for me.”</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Accidents Happen

**Author's Note:**

> This is set around _Small Favor_ for the Dresden Files, and around Chapter 100 of FMA. Because THAT'S HOW LONG I'VE BEEN TINKERING WITH THIS. 
> 
> You can judge me if you want. I'm judging me.

It was a surprisingly lovely summer morning in Chicago, and Harry Dresden was walking along the lake, looking for evidence of fairy-related shenanigans, but otherwise minding his own business.

Minding his own business had never saved him before, and it didn’t save him this time, either.

“For the love of everything holy,” Harry demanded of the world at large. “What _is_ that?”

“Envy,” said the blond kid who’d fallen from the sky. Even if he hadn’t fallen from the sky, Harry would have known he was nothing but trouble, on account of the _I am nothing but trouble_ expression, posture, and general attitude. Also yellow eyes were worrying on just about anyone.

Of course, in the event, he _had_ fallen from the sky.

It was hideously telling, then, that the blond kid was the least of Harry’s worries.

Sure, kids falling from the sky weren’t an everyday thing, not even in the life of Harry Dresden, extraordinarily unfortunate wizard. And walking suits of armor falling from the sky, while more on par, weren’t exactly common, either.

But the wormy thing. The wormy thing was winning the freaky contest.

“You what now?” Harry said. Intelligent commentary being just one of his many gifts.

“Envy,” the blond kid snapped, rolling his eyes. He was shaping up to be a real charmer, this kid. Or at least he was until he took a second to look around, because at that point, all the attitude disappeared. “Hang on,” he said. “Where the hell are we?”

“I don’t know, brother,” said the armor, because why not. Not that Harry was in a position to judge. Was a vampire better than talking armor, as brothers went? Probably that was a no.

“I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore?” Harry suggested. “You fell out of the sky. With a wormy thing. Is it my turn to ask what the hell is going on? Play fair.”

“Is this somebody’s stomach?” the blond kid asked the wormy thing. “Because if it is, that’s even more fucked up than last time.”

“Stomach?” Harry asked in an attempt to draw attention his way, maybe shake loose an answer or two. “ _Last_ time?” he went on, after that had sunk in. “What kind of stomachs do you guys hang out in?”

“Oh, shit, hang on.” The kid clapped and slapped his hands to the ground, then paused like he was expecting something to happen. Nothing did. “Not _again!_ ” he wailed, flopping back onto his butt and staring up at Harry like this was somehow his fault. “No _alchemy_ ,” he accused.

“Welcome to Planet Earth,” Harry said sarcastically.

“Where the hell is _Planet Earth?_ ” the kid demanded.

Okay, maybe not so sarcastically. “Wait, you’re an alien?”

“ _Envy!_ ” the kid howled.

“Don’t look at me,” said the wormy thing. “If it was up to me, you’d all be dead already.”

The wormy thing talked. Of course the wormy thing talked. Aliens, armor, and homicidal wormy things that talked. The day was young, but already it was in Harry’s top ten in terms of sheer what-the-fuck.

Well. Top fifty, anyway.

“Hey,” said the kid. “Likewise. If Mustang hadn’t been about to lose it and turn into Scar, Jr., I’d have let him kill you. But check it out, we’re all alive and here. Somewhere we don’t want to be. Again. Can we get the hell out and go back to trying to kill each other later? Cuz that worked out pretty well last time.”

“Fine,” Envy snarled, which would have been way more impressive if he hadn’t been a little wormy thing. “But I’m killing this human; it knows too much.”

“You’re killing him how?” the kid asked incredulously. “You gonna beat him up with your hand nubs?”

“I’ll take his body,” Envy explained.

“Is that really going to work?” the armor asked dubiously. “I thought that would only let you control his movements.”

“You don’t know shit, do you?” Envy sneered.

“ _Fuego_ ,” Harry said at that point.

What? It wasn’t human and it was talking about possessing and killing him. He’d had enough possession by evil things for one lifetime. Forget it.

That said, Harry’d kind of been expecting it to fight back, and it totally didn’t. At all. It just sat there and died with a sad little squeak. Harry maybe felt a tiny bit of guilt, despite himself. Monsters threatening to possess you should _fight back_. Wasn’t there some kind of rule about that? There should be a rule.

While Harry was having his mini-moral crisis, the blond kid stood up and stared at the pile of ash that had been…whatever… _Envy_.

Not Harry’s favorite sin, it had to be said. If it had been Wrath, he’d have hesitated. He was pretty up close and personal with Wrath. If it had been Lust, he’d have had a hard time. Envy? Please. He was so over that.

“No matter where I go,” the kid said thoughtfully, “there’s a goddamn pyromaniac there waiting for me.”

“Should he have been able to do that?” the armor asked. “Envy was based on a Philosopher’s Stone.”

“It was a really run-down stone, though,” the kid replied. “The Colonel figured out Envy killed Hughes and went ballistic, you don’t even know. Besides, if alchemy doesn’t work here, maybe the Philosopher’s Stone wouldn’t work either.”

“But if the Philosopher’s Stone didn’t work, how could Envy even be alive?” the armor countered.

“Good point. What was even binding all those lives together?” the kid wondered.

They both turned expectantly to Harry. He noticed they weren’t too worried about the fact that he’d burnt the wormy thing to a crisp. That struck him as strange; hadn’t they considered that he might go after them next?

Or was it that they weren’t impressed by eldritch flames? Because if that was the case, Harry found it, you know. Absolutely terrifying.

“Don’t look at me,” he said. “I’m winging it. I’ve only got the tiniest idea what you’re even talking about. In my world, the Philosopher’s Stone was the thing Isaac Newton got wrong.”

“Isaac Newton?” the armor asked curiously.

“Yeah, he was a physicist.”

“Physicist?”

“You know what? Never mind.”

“It’s a good word, though,” the armor insisted. Aw, how sweet. Harry’d never had a giant suit of armor trying to placate him before. “Physicist. It has a ring to it.”

“Whatever the hell it means,” the kid muttered. “And if we have to figure out what it means to get out of here, I’m gonna be really fucking pissed. So that wasn’t alchemy, whatever you used to burn Envy. Like a psycho. What was it?”

“Magic,” Harry intoned. Then he wiggled his fingers for good measure.

“There’s no such thing as magic,” the kid snapped.

“Really? Okay. There’s no such thing as aliens falling from the sky. La la la, you don’t exist.”

“You’re crazy, aren’t you?” the kid asked sadly, his expression suggesting he’d expected no better.

“Most people come to that conclusion sooner or later,” Harry allowed. “Although you got there fast. Who are you, by the way? Or should I just keep thinking of you as the kid and the armor?”

“I’m Al,” said the armor. “And this is my big brother, Ed.”

Harry looked between them. Big brother, huh? Yeah, he wasn’t touching that one with a ten foot pole. “Right. I’m Harry Dresden, Chicago’s finest wizard. Why did you fall out of the sky onto my city?”

“How should I know?” Ed asked, although now that they were properly introduced, he was asking with pretty good humor. “We were minding our own business.”

“We were trying to save the world. And overthrow the government,” Al put in mildly.

“The government is evil,” Ed said defensively.

“Yes, but my point is, brother, I don’t think we can really say we were minding our own business.”

“It doesn’t matter,” Ed insisted, “because now we’re on a _different planet_. Or in a stomach. Nothing we did should have put us here; it’s not like we got swallowed. And here’s some guy who toasted Envy without thinking twice or working up a sweat. That’s freaky, and it’s giving me the creeps.”

“Hm,” Al agreed.

Ah, good. If they found Harry freaky, then he was allowed to find them freaky without feeling like a wimp. “It wasn’t human, it was named after a sin, and it was talking about killing me,” he pointed out. “What did you expect?”

“You could have put him in jail?” Ed suggested, with an implied _oh my God, psycho_ tacked on.

“Around here, jails aren’t prepared to deal with creepy things that eat humans. I know, because I have this cop friend who went through a phase. Creepy things get angry, creepy things escape, people get eaten. I frown on that.”

“We wouldn’t have put him in jail, either, brother,” Al said quietly. “We would have killed him, too.”

“… _I_ wouldn’t have killed him.” Ed favored Al with an appalled stare.

“It wouldn’t have been a good idea to let him wander around loose,” Al argued. “I would have killed him.”

“Okay, that’s disturbing, and we’re discussing this later. But at least you _knew_ him.” Ed was apparently under the impression that this made killing less bad. Uh oh. “And you would have killed him after we got home. Now we’re stuck here with no idea where we are, no idea how we got here, and no Philosopher’s Stone to cheat our way back with. This is bullshit!”

So, great. They were stranded. Stranded on a planet not their own. One of them looked like a kid. They both acted like kids.

Kids, all alone on a strange planet playing by rules they didn’t know. And yeah, maybe they were trouble waiting for a place to happen, maybe they thought it was better to kill people you knew than it was to kill strangers, but…kids. All alone.

Oh, hell.

“I think,” Harry said, “that I’m going to have to take you home with me.” Chivalry sucked.

Ed sighed. “Well,” he said, “at least we’re not wading around in blood this time.”

Certainly that put things into a sort of perspective.

* * *

Harry stopped to call Thomas on the way home, feeling the need for a little backup that would be as weirded out by all this as he was. This meant Thomas was waiting for them in the apartment when they got there.

The armor—Al—took one look at him and said, “Oh, wow.”

That was a pretty normal reaction for a first-timer and the White Court. Ed’s reaction was less normal, but Harry was already coming to expect that.

Ed scowled. Viciously. And it wasn’t like Thomas had the charm in high gear or anything, but he was pretty charming even when he wasn’t trying. No one should have been _able_ to scowl at him like that.

Thomas was wounded by it, too. “What?” he asked. “We haven’t even been introduced.”

“Sorry.” Ed closed his eyes and visibly tried to pull it together. “You just remind me of a guy I hate. Not your fault. _You’ve_ never stood around waiting half an hour to make a goddamn entrance while I was fighting for my _fucking life_ and then said, ‘Oh, couldn’t you even handle that, Fullmetal?’ So. Shouldn’t take it out on you. Sorry.”

Thomas looked over at Harry with wide eyes, and the two of them carefully set that topic of conversation down and backed slowly away from it. _Fullmetal_ , huh? No. No, Harry did not even want to know. 

Mouse took this time to thump his head into Ed’s hip, demand petting, and wag his tail without any evidence of mistrust, so apparently Harry’d been right to bring the kids home, deadly sins, wading in blood, and all.

“Right,” Harry said. “Moving on. Thomas, this is Ed the alien and his brother Al, the alien in a suit of armor. Ed, Al, this is Thomas the vampire. Let’s all be friends.”

“Vampire?” Ed asked, scowl firmly back in place. “This world is such a freak show.”

Harry wished he could disagree, but he couldn’t. He could, however, have pointed out that this was coming from the kid with a suit of armor for a brother. He restrained himself, on account of he was trying to behave.

What? He tried sometimes. Admittedly not very often or very successfully, but it counted.

“This is a first for you, Harry,” Thomas said, sounding proud. “Demons, fairies, zombie dinosaurs, all that you’ve done. But aliens? And here I thought your life couldn’t get any weirder.”

“Yes, and that’s exactly why you shouldn’t think things like that,” Harry told him. “It’s a jinx.”

“That’s sound magical theory, is it?” Thomas asked.

“No, it’s sound granny superstition,” Harry said. “And I swear by it.”

“Uh huh. So what are you planning to do with the aliens?” Damn Thomas and his highly relevant questions.

“…Help them phone home?” Harry suggested.

“Do you guys even _do_ phoning home?” Thomas asked them.

“I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” Ed said in the flat tone of the extremely annoyed. Harry knew all about that tone. He got to hear it a lot, from all sorts of people. Maybe he should be keeping a list. Then he could add _alien_ to it, alongside cop, vampire, mob boss, fallen angel.

“There goes that plan,” Thomas shrugged. Easy for him to act so blasé about it. _He_ wasn’t the one who’d volunteered to house tetchy aliens.

“Right.” Harry scrubbed his face with his hands and collapsed onto the couch, gesturing for the alien brothers to sit. Which Ed did. Al, on the other hand, was too busy sprawling on the floor and cooing at Mister, who seemed pleased to have met a…being…who properly appreciated him. Harry could hear the purring from across the room. Mister was a traitor.

Thomas perched himself on the arm of the couch and prepared to be amused. Mouse sat next to Ed and made a doggy laughing face at Harry. Harry was in fact surrounded by traitors.

“Explain where you’re from, anyway,” Harry started, then thought better of it. “No, wait. I don’t care where you’re from. Give me your best guess as to how you _got_ here. Then we can work on getting rid of you.”

“That’s the thing,” Ed said, leaning forward with an intent look. “We really weren’t doing anything. We _have_ done some messed up stuff, but we—what were we doing, Al?”

“I don’t know what you were doing, brother,” Al said, clanking a little as he turned his head. Mister did not appreciate this lack of attention to Mister, and headbutted the armor. Harry could have told him that would be a bad idea.

“Oh, sorry!” The armor was apologizing to the cat. Al was turning out to be far more adorable than a huge hunk of metal had any right to be. “Um, I was heading to Central. I was just riding in a car. We were driving a little recklessly, maybe—”

“Wait, hang on, aren’t you supposed to be sitting in the dark with Pride?”

“About that…Kimbley kind of came along and blew up the hill.”

“ _What?_ ”

“But it’s okay!”

“ _How_ is it okay?”

“Can you guys worry about this sometime after I get rid of you?” Harry asked. “Please? Once you’re out of my city, I am all for you fighting your deadly sins or overthrowing the government or whatever it is you do. Away. From here.”

Ed shook his head and snorted. “‘It’s okay,’ he says. _Okay_.”

“Brother—”

“So while Al was doing _whatever_ , I was underground in Central getting attacked by those Philosopher’s Stone zombies,” Ed interrupted.

“Zombies?” Al demanded, incredulous.

“I had it under control,” Ed tossed off like zombies were nothing. They were not nothing, and no one knew it better than Harry Dresden. “And by the way, the Colonel’s a bastard.”

“Brother…”

“Average day for you?” Thomas asked Ed with polite curiosity.

“Not average, but hell. Not enough to send us to where-the-fuck-ever. We’ve done weirder stuff and stayed put. Right, Al?”

Al hummed agreement and scratched Mister under the chin.

“Right. Zombie fighting shouldn’t have done this, and it sounds like Al was just sitting in a car,” Harry said, “which, as far as I know, is not enough to warp space-time. So let’s assume the problem is on our end.”

Thomas sighed. “This is starting to sound like an average day for _you_ , anyway.”

“It’s weird that I haven’t noticed anything weird,” Harry mused. “Other than you two, obviously. Usually if weird is going to happen, I am the very first person who gets slammed by it. It’s the universe’s way of making me feel special.”

Ed snorted, possibly in sympathy.

“Well, be grateful while it—” _lasts_ , Thomas might have said. If something hadn’t crashed into the wards and rudely interrupted him. It reassured Harry, you know, about his relationship with the cosmos.

Thomas leapt into the air to get a glimpse out the window. “Well,” he said. “I have no clue what those things are.”

“Al,” Ed called, while giving Thomas a suspicious glare. Admittedly, that leap hadn’t looked particularly human.

“They don’t have eyes,” Al reported. Al didn’t have to jump to see out the window. Yikes. “They don’t look like their joints are right, either, brother. And…remember those lines Lust had down her arms?”

Lust. Envy and Lust and Pride. At least, Harry thought, he’d only had to deal with one measly fallen angel. Well, actually a bunch of fallen angels. Also vampires and FBI werewolves and wizard councils and…

Yeah, okay. So memory lane was full of scary thugs. But it wasn’t full of deadly sins, and that had to count for something.

“Hey, pyro guy,” Ed said.

“I do have a name,” Harry pointed out, but he was distracted, what with finding his staff and feeling out the wards.

“Hey, Harry Dresden, Chicago’s finest wizard,” Ed snapped. “Those are Philosopher’s Stone zombies. They don’t like fire. Can you get rid of ‘em?”

“I have had some experience with zombies,” Harry said. “Because my life is that kind of thrilling. So I set a trap—Thomas? There are only zombies out there, right? No neighborhood cats or anything?”

“If there were neighborhood cats before,” Thomas said, “they’re halfway digested by now.”

“Thank you for that,” Harry sighed, while Al made a little distressed noise. Eurgh. “Of course, my previous zombies were just the normal kind, so this may not work. And in that case, we’ll be screwed.”

“Hey, me and Al aren’t totally worthless, you know,” Ed said indignantly. “And what about this guy?”

“Thomas? Do you feel like fighting—” The wards crackled ominously. “…whatever did that?”

Thomas started stretching in preparation. “Do I have a choice?”

“If this doesn’t work? No.”

“Well, then.”

“So our plan is to blow things up. Failing that, to charge recklessly ahead,” Harry announced, edging toward the door. “As Ramirez would say, it has the advantage of simplicity.” And with that, he set off the trap he’d woven into the wards after his last zombie experience.

A ten-foot-deep ring around the house burst into violent flames. Harry strongly hoped that the neighbors were out shopping. They didn’t hear all that well, true, but surely even they would notice raging fire all around them.

The flames stayed strong for about five minutes, but the wards only had so much energy, and eventually they died down. Harry flung open the door.

Strike that. He _tried_ to fling open the door. The door, however, chose to ruin his dramatic moment by sticking, and he had to kick it for a while before it gave. Ed laughed at him. The kid had only been here an hour, and already he was just like the rest of Harry’s ungrateful friends and colleagues.

Outside, there were maybe a dozen human-shaped piles of ash, run through with…wires? Flat cables? Power cords?

“What,” Harry said blankly. “I mean… _what?_ ”

“I guess fire really is the easiest way,” Ed said moodily, kicking at the ashes.

“Why are _your_ zombies in _my_ city?”

“Don’t look at me like that!” Ed snapped. “It’s not like I brought them here. I didn’t bring them or Al or myself or anything else to this stupid place where alchemy doesn’t even work. _Okay?_ ”

“If you’ve never heard of this planet,” Thomas mused aloud, “by what logic are you speaking a language we understand?”

“By what logic are we even here in the first place?” Ed countered. “By crazy fucking logic, that’s what. In fact, maybe I’ve lost it and this is all a figment of my whacked-out imagination. Havoc always said it was a miracle I wasn’t nuts.”

“There you go,” Thomas said. “Maybe I’ve lost it, too. I’ve had a stressful life. It would make sense if none of this were real.”

“So why are we even worried about it?”

“We should just sit and wait for death.”

“Totally. That’d be the smart move.”

“If I could interrupt Philosophy 101 over there. Just for a second,” Harry said. “First of all, let’s have this conversation inside so we can pretend we’re innocent if the police show up. Second, zombies. Outside my door. Whether we’re all brains in a vat or not, they seemed real enough, and I’d be a happier wizard if I never saw them again. They’re from your planet. Do you have any wisdom on how to get rid of them?”

“Like I said, fire works pretty well,” Ed said, apparently unoffended by the interruption. “Check it out: they’re dead. But, seriously, why are Philosopher’s Stones working on a planet with no alchemy? That doesn’t make any fucking sense.”

“Last time, Xingian alchemy still worked,” Al put in.

“Oh, yeaahhh,” Ed said. “You guys have a lot of earthquakes around here?”

“What?” Harry asked, baffled. “No. Almost never.”

“There you go, then. But wait, hang on. Does that mean if we’d had time to learn the purification arts whatever…”

“If if if,” Al sighed.

“Fuck, this is _annoying_.”

“Start making sense,” Harry begged.

“I can’t make it make sense for you when it doesn’t make any sense to me,” Ed said, and while Harry was still pondering that, Al added, “It doesn’t make any sense at all. We really should have gone through the Gate, but instead…”

“Instead we just fell through the ground and ended up here,” Ed agreed with a frown toward the ash. “Me, Al, Envy, and a few of the Philosopher’s Stone zombies, at least. Did anything _else_ come through?”

“Oh, that is such a bad question,” Harry said.

“Want me to ask around?” Thomas asked.

“At the…salon?” Harry asked, eyebrows raised.

“That’s right, Harry,” Thomas said flatly. “The salon has hidden depths. Also I’m a caped crusader. _Not the salon_.”

“Is that a good idea?”

“I am family, after all.”

Yeah, that was what Harry was afraid of. “I’ll go talk to Butters first. Then Murphy. I don’t feel we’ve reached that Last Gasp of Desperation stage yet. I haven’t even almost died.”

Thomas shrugged.

“Watch Mouse?”

Thomas rolled his eyes, because Mouse required less watching than Harry did, and all three of them knew it. “Sure. Maybe I’ll dust.”

Seeing as Thomas had always been a strong contender in the slob Olympics, Harry doubted that. But whatever. “Aliens with me. We’re talking to a friend of mine who works in a morgue and knows from corpses, so if any weird things have turned up dead, he’ll be able to tell us. Sound like a plan?”

“Cool,” Ed said, shrugging. “Not like I have a plan. Al?”

Al nodded, gave Mister one last scratch, and clanked over to join them. Harry looked up at him—way up—and thought sad thoughts about what he was going to do to the Blue Beetle’s engine.

* * *

“Harry! What are you doing—why is he wearing armor?—oh my _God_ , what happened to that kid’s arm?” 

Ed had shrugged off his coat for the first time, and it turned out his arm was…metal? Or at least encased in metal? “I thought he was just an alien,” Harry said, “but it turns out he’s a cyborg, too. Who knew?” The armor made a little more sense, then. Sort of. Not really.

“Alien?” Butters repeated blankly. “ _Cyborg?_ ”

“Most of the time I have no idea what the fuck you’re talking about,” Ed informed both of them. “This is your morgue guy?”

“That’s right. Butters, meet Ed and Al, alien brothers from we’re not sure where.”

“Seriously, aliens?” Butters sat blinking for a while. “That’s…different. Wow. Could I…could I see your arm? I’m sorry if that’s rude, I just—it’s really amazing! We couldn’t make anything like that here.”

“Whatever.” Ed held out the arm, genially baffled. Harry found it telling that Butters, confronted with aliens, wanted nothing more than to check out their cool biotech.

“Was it made? You weren’t born with it, were you?”

“Huh? No, what the hell? I lost the original one, so they replaced it with this. Wired it in, see?”

Butters tugged Ed’s tank top aside and stared at the mess of scars where metal joined flesh, and then at Ed with an expression of deepest horror. “Why would you do this to yourself?”

“What?” asked Ed, two parts confused, one part hostile. “It’s not like automail was what I was aiming for—I didn’t hack off the original one or anything.”

Al made a thoughtful humming noise. Which was pretty weird, coming through armor.

“I didn’t hack off the original one _on purpose_ ,” Ed corrected. He must get some kind of bonus points in his personal life system for disturbing the hell out of bystanders. “Not really. Anyway, I needed an arm.”

“Yes, but…” Butters gently probed at Ed’s shoulder. “This must have been…first of all, I have no idea how you managed this. There shouldn’t be any way to generate enough power to run this arm.”

Ed and Al both shrugged. “Nervous system energy something something,” Ed said carelessly. “I wasn’t paying much attention to the machine freak.”

“And you can _feel_ things with this hand?” Butters asked. Ed tilted his hand in a so-so gesture. “Wasn’t that just…unspeakably painful to get done? I mean, I hate to think how jerked around your nervous system must have been.”

“You do what you have to do,” Ed said, then sent a sharp look Harry’s way. “Right?”

Harry was happy to see that Ed was of the opinion that they were soulmates in insanity. “Butters, I didn’t actually come here to show off the aliens.” Okay, that was kind of a lie. “Well, only a little. There was another reason, and it is this: have you seen any weird corpses lately?”

“You’re my go-to man on weird corpses, Harry,” Butters said absently, still investigating Ed’s arm. Ed had helpfully removed a panel so Butters could poke at the wires inside. Freaky. Wires. Harry took a cautious step back so he wouldn’t accidentally magic whammy the machinery. He felt like Ed might kill him if that happened. “Trust me,” Butters went on, “you’d be the first to know. And then Murphy. And then I would run screaming for the hills, because I am so over battling the forces of evil.”

Harry thought Butters wasn’t giving himself enough credit for bravery. Or stupidity, or whatever you wanted to call it. Harry knew he’d be right there riding the zombie dinosaur the next time. No sense in upsetting the poor man by arguing about it, though.

“No weird corpses, then. So far, so good.”

“Unless they’re here but not dead, in which case, they’re wandering around doing fuck knows what,” Ed pointed out.

“Gee, thanks, I hadn’t thought of that,” Harry said.

“That’s why we’re going to see the police next, brother,” Al whispered.

Harry was starting to think he’d like to keep Al.

* * *

“So,” Ed said, drumming his metal fingers on the Beetle’s window in an apparent attempt to drive Harry insane. “Magic. That’s a thing around here?”

“It is,” Harry allowed. “And yet almost no one believes in it.”

“Weird. Must be hard to find work, then. Guess that explains the crap car.” Tap tap tap, went the fingers.

“Hey, no insulting the Beetle.”

“Stop!” Ed shouted, and Harry reflexively slammed on the brakes, fishtailed a bit and then nearly crashed into a pole before coming to a halt. Ed, meanwhile, had flung himself out the door and run down an alley while the car was still fishtailing. Haha, Chicago at night, little kids running down darkened alleyways…

Harry jumped out of the car, too, and chased after Ed. He could hear the clanking of Al chasing after them both. Harry really hoped there was no one watching this parade.

“What the fuck are _you_ doing here?” Ed was shouting at a smiling teenager who had apparently been, uh. Lurking. In a darkened alleyway.

Harry raised his arm a little, braced to throw up a shield if he had to. _Be Prepared_ , that’s the Boy Scouts’ marching song.

“The real question is, where have _you_ been, Ed?” the boy asked. “I thought you were working for me. I don’t like it when my people suddenly disappear—”

“Oh, fuck you anyway, you took off first. It’s not like _I_ disappeared on purpose,” Ed complained. “And it’s the same as last time, ask Ling. Only this time, psycho over here burned Envy, so we don’t have a Philosopher’s…” He trailed off and eyed the boy speculatively.

“I don’t like it when my people think about breaking me down and using me for parts,” the boy said, raising a disapproving eyebrow.

“This is one of those people I’d prefer not to have wandering around my city, isn’t it?” Harry asked sadly.

“This is Greelin,” Ed explained with a put-upon sigh. “Sometimes he’s Ling, wannabe Emperor of Xing, which probably means fuck-all to you. Other times he’s Greed. Don’t even try to sort it out, it’s like the most annoying thing he’s ever done.”

“You’re working for him?” Harry asked.

“Uh.” Shifty eyes. “Don’t worry about it.”

Right. Don’t worry about the MPD deadly sin. Sure. “Is this one going to try to take over my body too?”

“No, he already took over Ling’s body, see? But Ling asked for it because he’s a goddamn idiot, so whatever.”

This was sounding more like the Denarian Nickelheads by the minute, and was making Harry super uncomfortable thereby.

“Why are we here, Ed?” the sin asked, apparently bored with the conversation.

“I have no idea. So I guess this means _you_ don’t know, either?”

“I was…” he frowned, like he couldn’t remember clearly, or maybe just didn’t want to. “I’m pretty sure I killed Wrath.”

“Wow,” said Al, and Ed whistled, impressed.

“No, it—Fu is dead. We couldn’t save him.”

“Oh. ‘M sorry,” Ed said quietly, reaching out to grip Greed’s shoulder. “He was a good guy.” Greed allowed the touch for a few seconds, then shrugged it off.

“Well, you know how it is,” he declared brashly. “If you want an omelet, you’ve gotta break a few eggs.”

The deadly sin was trying to act hard, and failing. It was really sad to watch. Harry was not prepared to ever feel this bad for a deadly sin; it was kinda blowing his mind.

“Yeah, right,” Ed muttered, obviously not fooled by Greed’s indifferent act either. “Anyway, we need to get the hell out of here. It’s not our world.”

Greed lit up in an alarming way. “Not our world?”

“…That’s right,” Al agreed, sounding as wary as Harry felt.

“You mean it’s a whole world full of things you can’t find _anywhere in our world?_ ”

Oh, right. _Greed_. Ha ha, awesome.

“No,” Ed said sternly.

“You don’t give me orders,” Greed chuckled, amused. “Jeez, I just have to keep reminding you and reminding you. I’m _Greed_. I do what I want, and I want _everything_.”

“I’m almost starting to like him,” Harry said. “Is that bad?”

Ed sighed in exasperation and Al said, “Well, you’re in good company.”

“Obviously you love me,” Greed agreed, sounding disturbingly like Ramirez. “What’s not to love? Anyway, this is a break in the action! I don’t know about you, but I could really use a break. Find me when you figure out how to get us home.”

“But,” Al tried desperately, “it would be easiest to just use your—”

“Not happening!” And with that, the MPD deadly sin ran cackling off into the night. Harry chased after him, or at least he started to, but then his arm was seized by a metal hand.

Harry’s response to being restrained was violent and, unfortunately, reflexive. He threw Ed across the alley without engaging his higher brain functions at all.

Ed landed like a cat, like he lived his life expecting to be thrown across alleys at any moment. Al, meanwhile, didn’t seem particularly bothered, but he did step closer to Harry, the better to loom over him. Seemed like they’d done this kind of thing before. Often.

Seriously, what kind of childhood had these two _had?_

“You didn’t need to _freak the hell out_ ,” Ed snapped, still crouched in a ready-for-anything stance.

“I’m sorry,” Harry apologized hastily. Throwing kids across alleys. Classy. “Reflex?”

Ed shrugged and straightened up. “Fair enough.”

_What?  
_  
“But you don’t need to chase Greelin. He won’t get up to anything too bad; he’s not a bad guy. He’s just upset. He needs some time, and we can find him when we need him. There’s only so many places a guy like him would want to go at night. So seriously. Don’t freak.”

Harry was now worrying even alien teenagers with his erratic behavior. Wonderful. “Right. Less freaking out, more going to the cops. Got it.”

“Um, actually,” Al put in, still looming slightly. “I’ve been thinking about it, and…it’d probably be better if you didn’t take me.”

“Oh? Why not?”

Al wordlessly held his hands out to the sides as if to say, ‘Hello, giant suit of armor.’

“I see your point,” Harry allowed, turning and heading back to the car. “But I don’t want to leave you at my place by yourself when we have no clue what we’re up against.” Honestly, he didn’t feel like leaving a strange suit of armor unsupervised in his apartment under any circumstances, no matter how cute said armor guy could be.

“Your brother’s still there, right?” Ed said as they got into the Beetle, which sagged ominously under Al’s weight. “They can keep an eye on each other.”

Harry started to nod, then realized what Ed had actually said. “What brother?” he demanded, trying not to let the paranoia frolic out to eat his common sense.

“Thomas,” Ed said, looking puzzled. “Isn’t he your brother?”

“Why would you think that?” Down, paranoia, down.

Ed shrugged.

“You act like brothers,” Al said.

…Okay, so the new plan was to figure out how brothers acted and then stop doing it. It had been one thing for Molly to figure them out, but random alien kids? No way should random alien kids have been able to tell they were brothers.

It was a short trip from people figuring out the brother thing to Harry Dresden Witchhunt, take two. Or maybe three, or even ten, depending on how you wanted to count these things.

Harry sighed. He felt like he’d been doing a lot of sighing today. “Fine. _In that case_. We’ll drop Al off at home and then go check in with Murphy, who probably won’t know anything, but should definitely be warned. And then we’ll have to come up with an actual plan.”

Ed folded his hands behind his head and kicked his feet up on the dashboard. He really was _short_ , wasn’t he? “Sounds like fun,” he allowed, grinning a maniac’s grin.

Harry wasn’t used to his company being more reckless than he was. It was unsettling.

* * *

“I’ve been waiting for an hour,” Molly announced as soon as Harry stepped out of the car. She pointed accusingly at Thomas, who was standing behind her and smirking. “He wouldn’t tell me where you were or when you were getting back!”

Ah. It was a Molly training day. And Harry had forgotten. Fail.

Okay, so he’d been distracted by aliens falling from the sky, but it was still a fail.

“I’m back now?” he tried. “But actually…can we put training off until tomorrow? Something came up.”

“And…you couldn’t have called and told me that before I came all the way over here?”

He could have. He really could have.

“You’re not even going to tell me what it’s about, are you?”

He wasn’t. Molly probably wasn’t going to care for that much, either. “It’s not your area of expertise, grasshopper.”

“Not my area of _expertise?_ ”

This was shaping up to be an unpleasant conversation.

“If you never _train me_ , how am I going to _have_ an area of expertise? You know, if I’d known we weren’t training today, I could’ve stayed home and studied on my own, but no, I thought I’d be here, so all the kids have friends over, so the house is a total—”

And then she abruptly interrupted herself mid-rant with, “Wait, who are _they?_ ”

Harry turned to see that Ed and Al had climbed out of the car. He turned back to Molly. She was staring at Ed with distinctly non-professional interest. Harry silently vowed to stop bringing fascinating, dangerous men into Molly’s life. He was getting used to having Charity _not_ hate him with the fire of a thousand suns.

“I thought you were focusing on magic, grasshopper,” Harry said. “Besides, he’s too young for you. And too short. Also an alien. He’s probably got alien cooties. Didn’t you see _Space Balls?_ ”

That distracted her. “You’re talking about that scene in _Space Balls_ that was stolen from _Alien_ , aren’t you?” she asked, scandalized. Some horror purists just couldn’t handle spoofs. Harry found it sad.

“I liked it better with the tap-dancing,” he said.

“Nothing’s going to burst out of my stomach,” she insisted. “And _nothing_ is going to burst out of my stomach and _tap dance!_ ”

“I worry,” Thomas murmured.

“Wait, you have aliens today?” Molly said, bulling past the attempted movie sidetrack. “That’s why you don’t want me around? Aliens?”

“Aliens,” Harry confirmed.

Molly considered that. “I’m not that into aliens,” she eventually decided. “See you tomorrow.”

And just that easy, she nodded to Ed and Al in passing, jumped in the Carpenter family car, and was gone. Too easy. Far, far too easy. Harry knew that meant he would be paying for this wasted trip and lack of explanation later, and possibly for the rest of his life. Normally he didn’t stand for Molly lecturing him, but this time, he’d been pretty clearly in the wrong, so he was just going to have to take the lecture. He sighed. Again.

“I think that went well,” Thomas said bracingly.

“Your support means so much to me, Thomas.”

“Well, it should, because I think I figured out what brought your aliens here,” he announced. “You can tell me how impressed you are. I’ll wait.”

Ed and Al sidled up to them, interested.

“I bow to your superior technique,” Harry allowed. “How did you find this out?”

Thomas looked worryingly evasive. “I don’t ask you how you find things out.”

“Yes, and I’m always wounded by your indifference.”

“Harry. Do you want the information, yes or no?”

“I do, I do.” Note to self: look into Thomas’s shady information-gathering techniques at another, less alien-ridden time.

“It’s your Black Council again.”

“Aw, come on. What happened to the good old days when we just had one-off loonies? I miss the one-off loonies, Thomas.”

Thomas shrugged. “Sorry. Black Council. Deal with it. And it looks like they were trying to pull in some…evil thing.”

“Was it an evil thing from outer space, by chance? Evil demons from space? Please say yes, because that is just what I need today.”

Thomas unhelpfully shrugged again. “Maybe it was supposed to be from another dimension. Anyway, their aim was off.”

“So they were aiming for an evil demon from space and instead got a kid, a suit of armor, some zombies, and a couple of deadly sins.”

“Probably.”

There was a moment of silence as they all digested this.

“You mean it was an _accident!?_ ” Ed howled.

“You were all in Gluttony’s stomach,” Al pointed out thoughtfully. “Except for the Philosopher’s Stone zombies. Unless Gluttony ate some zombies at some point. I mean…he probably did.”

Stomachs, Harry thought. Again with the stomachs.

“You weren’t in his stomach,” Ed said dubiously.

“My arm was in there,” Al explained.

Wow. Seriously, with every word that came out of their mouths, Harry wanted to know their life story a little less.

“Maybe he even fed Gluttony some zombies as an experiment,” Ed murmured thoughtfully. “Wouldn’t surprise me, the old sicko. So if we’re right, then we’re all…not totally tied to Amestris, I guess? We’ve been thrown around—and specifically into Gluttony’s version of the Gate. So is Gluttony here somewhere?”

“He _is_ a Gate, he’s not _in_ the Gate.” Al argued. “Besides, Pride ate him.”

“ _Ate_ him?” Ed repeated, horrified.

Al nodded with a grating sound. “It was really awful, brother.”

“No, _really?_ Ugh, homunculi. But…yeah, that seems like it explains it.” They nodded at each other, apparently satisfied. And then Ed said, “You really mean Pride actually _ate_ —”

“Okay! Enough with the cannibalism talk. Was any of that helpful to me?” Harry cut in, because he was trying for optimism this week.

The brothers looked at each other, then back at Harry, and shook their heads. “No,” Ed admitted glumly. “I mean, we think we see why the people who ended up here got lucky like that. Otherwise? I got nothing.”

“Why _did_ the people who ended up here end up here?” Harry asked.

“Um…we’ve got some instability about which world we belong in, I guess is the easiest way to say it. We’ve jumped worlds before, all of us.”

On the bright side, Harry was starting to feel like, comparatively, his life wasn’t even weird. “You’ve done this _before?_ ”

“Not like _this_ ,” Ed said impatiently. “Have you ever heard of the Gate over here?’

“The Gate? No, but I can hear the capital letter, so I’m guessing it’s a big deal. What Gate?”

“Never mind,” Ed said, looking relieved. “Seems like if anybody here would know about it, you would. Besides, like I said, we didn’t come here through the Gate. This trip is probably related, but it’s not the same thing.”

“So, in theory, you guys were barely stuck to your own world already, so you were the ones who got pulled through, like loose metal shavings drawn to a magnet,” Harry mused. “Pure mistake. I wonder when they’re gonna figure out how badly they screwed up, because it seems to me that there should’ve been people around to meet you when you arrived. People other than me. I’m guessing you landed in the wrong place, on top of everything else. So maybe they think they _did_ summon their demon.”

“Doubtful,” Thomas put in. “Pretty sure they’d have noticed a loose demon by now. They probably just think the ritual failed.”

“Oh, awesome,” Ed said, taking the words right out of Harry’s mouth. “So they’re gonna try _again_.”

“Bright side,” Thomas observed, “is that if they think they failed, they won’t think anybody’s noticed anything wrong. So they shouldn’t be too on guard yet.”

“Yeah, no expects the Spanish Inquisition! So, do your anonymous sources know where these guys are doing their creepy ritual, Thomas?” Harry asked hopefully. “Or…who, exactly, the Black Council’s using to pull it off?”

“Actually, yeah.” Thomas pulled a ziplock bag with a lock of hair in it out of his jacket pocket, which—so convenient!

A little too convenient, in fact. “Did Lara give you that?” Harry demanded, suspicious. “Why did she have that?”

“In order, yes, Lara gave me this. And she met the guy a while ago for…unrelated reasons, and decided she didn’t like his looks. She’s been keeping an eye on him ever since. He’s just a goon—trust me. She interrogated him herself, and he doesn’t know anything worth knowing. But he is on the guard rotation for the place—not that he knows where exactly it is. People higher on the food chain drive all the guards there blindfolded. He’s still on the schedule, though—should be there now, in fact. It’s not like anybody knows Lara got to him, and he’s not telling.”

“Wow, Lara is terrifying,” Harry said, trying not to think about what interrogation by Lara probably entailed, as that simultaneously turned him on and made him break out in a cold sweat, and it was confusing. “And she just happened to collect genetic material so that I could hunt him down? Because I’m not sure I buy that.”

Thomas shrugged. “Lara likes to plan for every eventuality. I’m sure you were just one strategy. Probably not even the first one.”

Yeah, that sounded about right. Lara was fairly evil and extremely terrifying, but you had to hand it to her, she had style. Also strategy.

“So…you can find the people who brought us here using _hair?_ ” Al piped up, puzzled.

Come to think of it, this conversation had to be making no sense to the aliens at all. “That’s right. As long as I’ve got someone’s hair, blood, nails—whatever—I can find them anywhere in Chicago.”

“Creepy,” Ed said, sounding impressed. “How does that work?”

Harry grinned. He loved this part.

* * *

Ed and Al stood staring, fascinated, at the model of Chicago. Harry was feeling unbearably proud of himself, but he thought he hid it well.

“So,” Ed said, “from here you can find _anyone?_ ”

“As long as I have something to track them with, yes,” Harry agreed.

Ed stared another long moment. “What d’you think, Al?”

Al sighed. “Impossible, brother.”

Ed’s head snapped up and his eyes flashed. Whoa. Apparently _impossible_ was a dirty word.

“Look, even if we could copy this with alchemy, we’d have to stay in one place for _years_ to make any use of it!” Al argued, gauntlets raised defensively. “Which city would you watch? Stop looking at me like that!”

“Sorry,” Ed muttered, then frowned at Little Chicago. “It’s so cool, though. Maybe we should make one of Central for Mustang if he ever gets to be fuhrer.”

“That would be a great present,” Al agreed thoughtfully. “And the Lieutenant would like it, too.” They both considered Little Chicago again.

“As flattered as I am by your awe and amazement,” Harry interrupted, “can we get back to this minor problem of the world ending?”

“Again,” said Thomas.

“ _Again_ is an overstatement,” Harry insisted. “It stopped short of ending last time.”

“And the time before that.”

“I plan to go for three in a row. Who’s with me?”

“The world’s not _ending_ ,” Ed said, exasperated. “Well. It’s probably not ending. Unless jumping from one universe to another destabilizes them both, but if it does, I’m pretty sure we’re already screwed, so there’s no point worrying about it.”

“Way to think positive, Ed,” Harry said. “And in fact, I’m almost sure that having people outside their own universes _does_ cause stability issues.”

“Great. Well, all I can say is, if we’re gonna die anyway, I want to find these assholes first and make them pay.” Ed gestured impatiently with his metal hand. “So get on with it. Make the magic happen.”

“You’re a treasure to work with,” Harry informed him. “I want you to know that.”

“Yeah, yeah,” drawled Ed, unmoved, as Al hid his face in his hands and Thomas snickered off to the side. “Heard it all before, but with like ten times meaner sarcasm.”

“Meaner sarcasm?” Harry was possessed of quite cutting sarcasm, thank you very much.

“What can I say? My commanding officer is a dick.”

Wow. Commanding officer, huh? Ed looked like he was _maybe_ fifteen. Harry decided he didn’t want to think about that ever again, so he went ahead and set up the tracking spell in silence.

Al was very impressed with the process, bless his metal heart. He oohed and aahed in all the right places, and Harry found it gratifying. Or at least, he did until he saw where the spell was leading him. Then he was just exasperated, because seriously, _what were the odds?_

“Do you know who that building belongs to, Thomas?”

“I’m guessing you’re not going to say Lara, so, Marcone? He’s the only other one who makes you make that face.”

“Why is it _always Marcone?_ ”

“Oh, come on, this’ll be fun.” Thomas beamed because he had no proper sense of sympathy. “We know he’s not Black Council, so they’re using his building without his okay. Think how pissed off he’ll be.”

Well. True.

“Marcone?” Ed asked dubiously. “What’s he like?”

“Johnny Marcone is a terrible, awful human being for whom I feel many complicated things, contempt being foremost among them,” Harry explained. “But specifically because he’s a terrible person, he can be useful when it comes to causing mayhem.”

“Huh.” Ed gave that some consideration, then nodded. “So if we know where this stuff is going down, do we still need to visit the cops?”

“We still need to visit Murphy, because I need her to lie, cheat, and steal in order to keep all the other cops away from that neighborhood tonight.”

“And you want to show off your aliens,” Thomas added.

“Obviously,” Harry agreed.

“No, it’s cool,” Ed muttered resentfully. “Just pickle me in formaldehyde and stick me in a jar for everybody to ogle, I don’t mind at all. Fuckers.”

“However, Al made a good point about it being a bad idea for him to waltz into a police station looking the way he does,” Harry bulled on, ignoring the side commentary. “So he’s going to stay here and you, Thomas, are going to watch him. And the both of you—stay out of trouble.”

“No worries. We’re the untouchables,” Thomas said. He held up his fist and Al gamely banged his gauntlet off it.

Harry wondered if he looked as disturbed by that statement as Ed did. He suspected the answer was yes.

* * *

Al was looking forward to talking to Thomas for a bit. If nothing else, he thought, they could bond over their mutual constant struggle to keep their maniac brothers alive. It was kind of funny that Al was in armor and Thomas was a vampire, yet they were both way more normal than their totally human brothers.

It didn’t work out, though, because Al’s life was, well. It was just like that. He used to blame Ed, but no, it was clearly both of them. So no sooner did he and Thomas sit down in the living room and let the animals get comfortable than Thomas sat bolt upright and jerked around to face the door.

“I’m sorry, Al,” he said distantly, looking…scary and pale and not like himself. “My sister is waiting outside, and I may need to run an errand for her before she’ll leave me alone. I think you should hide in the basement. If Harry gets back before I do, tell him Lara’s taking more of an interest than we thought. Okay?”

Al nodded seriously. He could see that Thomas was afraid and trying to hide it, and he didn’t even want to know what it would take to scare a vampire. Well, if this was Thomas’s sister, then…another vampire, probably. But even for a vampire, Thomas seemed pretty tough. His sister must’ve been the scariest vampire in the _world_.

“There’s a talking skull in the basement,” Thomas said like that was a normal thing. Al just nodded again, because this was clearly not the moment to cry about how bizarre this world was. “His name is Bob. If you hear explosions or someone coming down the stairs, ask Bob to hide you. If it’s me or Harry, no problem, but if it’s not…it’ll be better if they can’t find you. Harry makes a lot more enemies than friends.”

Given the way Harry acted like an even snarkier Ed, this did not come as a shock to Al.

* * *

There really was a talking skull named Bob in the basement. It wasn’t that Al had thought Thomas was lying or anything, it was more that he hadn’t _wanted_ to believe it.

Bob introduced himself. Al introduced himself in return and explained the situation as best he could, given that he didn’t understand it at all. Bob declared that everything sucked. Al agreed.

At that point, conversation stalled, which left Al with nothing to do but pace around the basement nervously and wonder if Thomas was okay, and how they were going to get home, and whether Ed and Harry had managed to run into one of Harry’s horde of enemies yet. Because Al wouldn’t be surprised. He wouldn’t be surprised _at all_. He made a small, panicked noise and punched a wall.

“Hey kid, don’t freak, I can’t handle it,” piped up Bob the skull. “You know what happens when Harry freaks? Things explode. He calls up demons. Crazy shit. If you’re even _thinking_ about pulling any of that, you can get the hell out of my basement. You’re not the boss of me and I don’t have to put up with it.”

Al stopped pacing and took the equivalent of a deep breath. He was acting like his brother, and while he loved his brother dearly, the universe really only needed one.

Besides, there was something very embarrassing about being told to calm down by a possessed skull.

“Hey, I know it’s tough,” the skull said sympathetically. “Trust me, I feel your pain, kid. Or neither of us feels any pain, which is the whole problem, am I right? And then on top of that, I’m constantly getting ditched, and now you are, too. You know how many years I been in one basement or another without anybody letting me out for more than a couple days? Do you?”

“Um. No?”

“Well I’m not gonna tell you, because once you pass a certain number of decades, it just gets depressing. But at least I’ve got my little entertainments. _You_ know.”

Al wondered how Bob was managing to give the impression of knowingly waggling his eyebrows when he didn’t have eyebrows. “I don’t know. Um, sorry.”

“Oh, you poor kid,” Bob gasped. “You’re with your brother, right? Is he totally useless? How old are you?”

“I just turned fifteen,” Al said, trying not to make every statement sound like a nervous question.

“Fifteen! Fifteen in that body! Shit, that’s the saddest thing I ever heard. Here, here.” A book pitched off the end of Bob’s shelf, and Al cautiously picked it up. “That’ll keep your mind occupied. It’s not the same, obviously. But us guys without bodies, we have to make do. And you being a young man, that’s…damn, that’s just not fair. Go on, kid. Chapter 16 is a good one.”

Al opened the book with curiosity and a little dread, seeing as the cover featured people wearing very little clothing, and he had deep suspicions about the storyline. And yeah, by the end of page one, if he could have been blushing furiously, he would have been.

No, he was sure his _soul_ was blushing.

“Um,” he said nervously. “Mr. Bob?”

“Call me Bob, kid. It’s too weird. The cat’s called Mister.”

“Um, Bob,” Al corrected. “Does this book have a plot at all?”

“Sure it does, sure!” Bob paused to consider. “Well, but it’s mostly a vehicle for the porn. You get your varieties of romance novel. Some of them really do have a plot, but it’s tough to weave that coherently with the porn. See what I’m saying? It either needs to be about the porn or about the plot. People who try to do both, they’re just confusing themselves and their readers. I like to stick with the porn; it’s got the purer artistic vision. So yeah, that has a plot, but it’s just there to get you to care more about the porn.”

Al stared. First he’d been handed this book, which was…was… _indecent_. And now he was getting a lecture. On indecent books.

This kind of thing never happened at home.

* * *

“So we’re going to the police to convince them that they should stay away from a neighborhood tonight,” Ed asked, apparently for clarity’s sake.

“Right.”

“And you have, what, one friend in there?”

“Maybe two.”

“Yeah, I really think I should be the one who talks to the cops,” Ed announced decisively.

“I really think you look like a kid, kid,” Harry replied. “I really think the cops would boot you back out into the street and tell you to stop with the pranks.”

“So your look is better? You look like a violent hobo.”

It was terrible, the way Ed was so hesitant to say what he really thought. “Yeah, well. Better the violent hobo you know.”

Ed snorted, unimpressed. “You mean them knowing you is supposed to be a good thing?”

“Hey, you’re the one hanging out with me of your own free will. Apparently I’ve got some redeeming qualities.”

“Yeah, but that’s me,” Ed said earnestly. 

This was the thing about Ed: he went along making perfect sense, and then when you were least expecting it, he abruptly made no sense. Maybe it was an alien thing. “What?”

“For me, it’s different.” Ed could see he wasn’t getting through. He waved a frustrated hand. “You’re…it’s like I know you. You’re familiar, I guess.”

Oh, really?

Well, maybe. Ed, now that Harry let himself think about it, had the—familiar, indeed—look of someone who had _seen some shit_. Sure, he was gold and shiny and wild. But tired, under that. Somebody whose eyes Harry sincerely never wanted to look into.

Zombies, forsooth. Deadly sins. No wonder.

“I’m familiar to the police, too,” Harry said, trying to steer the conversation back toward the mundane. “They’re a hardy bunch. Wait ‘til you meet Murphy. You guys will get along like something terrifying.”

Ed huffed and folded his arms, but it was true. Oh God, was it true.

* * *

“Murph, I have great news!”

Murphy responded to his enthusiasm with every bit as much suspicion as he could’ve hoped for. “You, good news? I’m sure I would have heard the cracking sound if Hell had frozen over.”

“Check this out, and then see if you can mock!” he declared, and hauled Ed out of the Blue Beetle. “I had to pull from another planet or maybe dimension to do it, but I have at last…found someone shorter than you!”

Ed went ballistic. It was interesting, if unexpected. He’d been so cool with everything up to then. Who’d seen the short man complex coming?

“It’s an alien?” Murphy asked over the shrieking. “It looks like a kid. Does it do tricks?”

“ _It!_ ” Ed howled.

“I know, right?” Harry said. “I was hoping for green skin at least. Another of life’s little disappointments.”

“Don’t _call_ me _little!_ ”

“Whoa,” said Harry, as Ed made a spirited attempt to kick his head off. “Such a temper for a small guy.”

Ed howled in inarticulate rage. It was a good thing Harry’d spent so many years dodging various people who were trying to kill him, or he’d have ended this conversation unconscious on the floor. As it was, he got some shiny new bruises and maybe a sprained wrist. Ed was scrappy.

“ _Enough_ ,” Murphy snapped once she’d had all the shenanigans she could take.

Ed froze like he’d been stabbed. Wow. Looked like somebody’d put the fear of tiny blonde women in him at some point.

“Get inside before you make even more of a spectacle,” Murphy snarled, herding them inside, past all the desks full of staring cops, and into an interrogation room. At some point they picked up a Rawlins accessory. Rawlins was laughing at them, of course. Harry wished he could be the one sitting back and laughing, but noooo, he had to be right in the middle of the mess.

“Dresden’s brought us an alien,” Murphy informed Rawlins once the door was shut.

“No kidding,” Rawlins said, eyebrows lifted in faint surprise. “Doesn’t look like an alien. Looks like a punk kid.”

Ed smiled proudly at this, and that was everything you needed to know about Ed, right there.

“Lose the jacket, Ed,” Harry suggested. “Show off the shiny tech.”

“ _Fine_ ,” Ed grumbled, losing his smile and shrugging his coat off, resigned.

Murphy and Rawlins stared for a long time in a very gratifying way.

“That kid’s arm is made of metal,” Rawlins mentioned eventually.

“That’s very observant of you, Rawlins,” Harry said. “But then it isn’t your lack of observation skills that keeps getting you busted down from detective, is it? It’s your attitude problem.”

“Don’t give me shit,” Rawlins replied, unruffled. “I just like to point out that I’m the normal one now and again. Gives me a warm glow.”

“The metal arm is, I’ll admit, weird,” Murphy allowed. “But it’s not exactly proof of alien, Dresden. And even if it were, why is this my problem? It doesn’t seem like he’s a hostile alien. We’ve had worse.”

“He wants to go home,” Harry explained. “And who can blame him? Here he is, a kid lost in Chicago, far from everything he knows. This is so a matter for the police.”

Murphy sighed and turned to Ed, who’d thrown himself into an interrogation chair and was now balancing it improbably on one leg. “So you’re from another dimension. How did that happen, exactly?”

“You’re asking me? You should be asking that guy,” he said, waving at Harry while still, somehow, managing to keep the chair balanced. Impressive. “But from what I’ve heard him saying, there’s some Council of Evil that was trying to summon a demon thing to your world—because demons are a thing here, what the hell—but they fucked it up and accidentally got me and my brother instead. The good news is, we know where they live, so Dresden wants you to keep all the cops away from there so we can go punch them in the face until they cough up their dimension hopping magnet thing.” He let the chair thump down to all four legs again with a horrible screech and turned to look at Harry. “That about right?”

“Can we call it a Doom Magnet?” Harry asked earnestly.

“Whatever makes you happy, pyro guy,” Ed told him.

“I like the kid,” Rawlins decided. “No chance we can keep him around?”

“Hey, I have a home to go to,” Ed protested. “I can’t be wasting time hanging around with you assholes, I got things to do.”

“Also his presence could conceivably destabilize both our universe and his, and then, you know. The blood, the fire, the end times,” Harry added.

“Should’ve known better than to ask,” Rawlins sighed.

“Give us the address and we’ll do our best,” Murph said, clearly not thrilled about this newest weirdness happening in her town. “But all your bullshit is destroying my credibility, so don’t expect much.”

“Every little bit helps,” Harry told her, and then his phone rang before he could get any more poetic on the subject. (Thomas was amusing himself this month by buying Harry cell phones. They usually broke within a couple of days, but Thomas just kept buying them. Harry was starting to suspect it was some kind of weird thaumaturgical experiment, but was afraid to ask.)

Appropriately enough, it was Thomas. Thomas, who had apparently abandoned Al in a room alone with Bob—because no world-ending disasters could possibly come of that arrangement—in favor of running around town with his soul-sucking sister. The information gained from this adventure might turn out useful, but Harry still felt like the eventual blood and tears Lara would extract in exchange made it not worth it.

Why. Why everything.

“According to my source,” Harry announced once he’d hung up, trying to sound official and important, “the Doom Magnet is a highly delicate and unstable working that depends heavily on order and timing and placement of the requisite parts. And there are apparently hundreds of requisite parts, some of them really hard to come by and good for one use only, which at least explains why we haven’t had any extra-dimensional visitors before. Plus, the dimensional travel works like pulling a rubber band—if they lose the magnet, any and all visitors ought to snap right back to their original dimension. It’s only the magnet that’s holding them here.”

“So what happens if we kick the magnet?” Ed asked, because he was a kid after Harry’s own heart.

“Unfortunately, the whole building is technically part of the magnet. But you’ve got the right idea—if we destroyed the whole thing, they’d have to start over from scratch. And some of the ingredients…I’m betting it would take them decades if not centuries to come up with more of them.”

“So basically what you’re saying is, everything will be fixed if we blow up that building,” Ed clarified. “Right?”

“Well, yeah,” Harry allowed. “If we blew up the building, the Doom Magnet would be ruined, and it’d take forever to recreate it. If they even can, because managing to line all that crap up at just the right astrological moment really was a chance in a million. They lucked out, and even then, they didn’t get what they wanted. So yeah. Yeah, that would do it. And it’d really piss them off, too.”

Ed clearly didn’t understand what he was missing. “So…why don’t we just blow up the building?”

Harry gazed at him in admiration. “I like your style, kid.”

“ _Dresden_.”

“Aw, Murph. You’re such a spoilsport.”

“I’m the voice of reason, and it’s damned lucky there is one in this room.”

“We can just wait until there’s no one in there, right?” Ed went on, still puzzled. “No one would get hurt. So what’s the problem?”

Murphy gave Harry a dead-eyed stare. “Well, Dresden, you had to pull from another planet or maybe dimension to do it, but you have at last found someone _crazier than you_.”

* * *

“You can’t just come out and say stuff like that in front of Murphy, Ed,” Harry explained as they left the station several dire warnings from Murphy later. “She’s got this thing about protecting the city. The whole city, even the annoying parts. So you just have to go do the things and then act like you didn’t mean to.”

Ed raised an eyebrow. “Well, it’s too late for that now. She’ll know it’s us.”

“She will unless it clearly isn’t us.”

“…But she’ll still know it was our idea.”

“Yes, but she won’t be able to _prove_ anything.”

“You do get that someday she’s going to shoot you,” Ed pointed out. “And everybody’s going to laugh. Especially Rawlins.”

“Nah, she wouldn’t shoot me. She has tried to arrest me a couple of times, but I like to think she’s over that.”

“Yeah, okay,” Ed muttered dubiously. “So who are you gonna try to frame for this?”

“Well,” Harry said, “when I’m planning to throw someone under the bus, I like it to be one of my least favorite people.”

* * *

“Harry Dresden,” said Gentleman Johnny Marcone, studying them from across his obscenely expensive and oh-so-shiny new desk. “It’s been so long. I was beginning to think you didn’t care.”

“It hasn’t been that long,” Harry corrected. _Tragically_. And the shiny desk was distracting. Harry kept wanting to watch Marcone’s face in the desk instead of…in the face? Harry did not appreciate these office upgrades.

Marcone’s reflected eyebrows went up, and Harry forced himself to look at the man himself. No mirror desk. Focus, focus. “And you never write,” Marcone said.

“My parole officer used to say the same thing.”

“Did he really?”

“No.”

“Interesting. And who have you brought me, today? You know I don’t like surprises, Dresden.”

“Yeah, I don’t like them either. But he was a surprise to me, too, and I’m a sharing kind of guy. John, this is Ed the alien. Ed, this is Gentleman Johnny Marcone, biggest bastard in Chicago.”

“An alien.” Marcone blinked. “Unusual even for you, Dresden.”

“That’s what Thomas said.”

“You remind me of a murderer I know,” Ed told Marcone, scowling suspiciously. Ed was pretty perceptive, Harry had to hand it to him.

“And how many murderers do you know?” Marcone asked, amused.

“One more than I did yesterday, right?” Ed muttered.

“Hm.” Marcone studied them both in that I’m-a-scary-mobster way of his. “I assume you didn’t bring your alien so that I could enjoy the novelty, Dresden. What do you want?”

“So the world is ending,” Harry said, waving his hands in demonstrative explosion-type gestures.

“Oh,” said Marcone. “Again?”

“Can we have more _Ride of the Valkyries?_ ” Harry asked.

“Wouldn’t the theme to _The Twilight Zone_ be more appropriate?”

“I don’t like to encourage the weirdness,” Harry said piously, “when I can kick its ass instead. How do you feel about blowing up one of your warehouses to save the world?”

“I’ve destroyed buildings for less noble reasons,” Marcone allowed. “I assume this has something to do with the alien?”

“Phone home,” Harry explained.

“What the _fuck_ ,” Ed snapped irritably.

“Plus the evil guys using it for evil are totally using it without your permission,” Harry went on. “You can’t let that stand. Think of your reputation! Anyway, Murph’s gonna kill me if I destroy the place, but my thought is, if she knows _you_ did it, everything’ll be fine. She hates you already.”

“She’ll know it was your idea,” Marcone pointed out.

“See? Even this guy knows you’re gonna get your ass handed to you.” Ed the alien: new depths of unhelpful commentary every day. And Harry couldn’t even complain too loudly, because Marcone was already on the phone talking to…whoever it is you call when you need to blow up your own property. He was getting really responsive when it came to this doomsday crap. Was that a good thing, or just symptomatic of _how much_ doomsday crap had been going down lately?

Best not to think about it, probably.

Not too long after that, Gard showed up, because clearly that is who you call when you need to blow stuff up. Should’ve seen that one coming. Also, it should not have surprised Harry as badly as it did when she and Ed became instant friends. They seemed to be bonding over recipes for explosives. Which was not terrifying at all.

Seriously, Ed was _maybe_ mid-teens. It was deeply distressing to Harry to hear him waxing lyrical about this one time he stumbled across some unstable dynamite in an abandoned mine, and it was _great!_

It only took another, say, ten traumatizing minutes to successfully arrange the destruction of a building in downtown Chicago, so that was efficient. Horrifying, but efficient.

Marcone refused to be on-site when blowing up his own building, so instead he sent Gard and Harry and Ed and a handful of interchangeable, vaguely bovine thugs. The disposable ones, presumably. Well, except for Gard, who was the next best thing to unkillable.

“Aren’t we supposed to get Al and Thomas for this?” Ed asked as they headed toward the Blue Beetle. (Disappointingly, Marcone didn’t judge this errand urgent enough to rate a helicopter, so they were going to have to drive.)

“I mean, technically, yes,” Harry admitted. “But they’re kinda conspicuous, and when it comes to blowing up buildings, they wouldn’t be much help, so I think we can safely leave them in my apartment and let them get mad at us later.”

Ed considered that, then nodded reluctantly. “Al _is_ pretty easy to spot,” he allowed.

“Thomas is honestly not much better,” Harry pointed out. “What with being the most gorgeous man on the block, every block. It’s depressing.”

Ed grimaced at that, probably due to his ongoing issues with attractive people. Weird kid.

* * *

There were indeed visible goons guarding the building, which—how suicidal was _that_ choice? The Black Council had to know that sooner or later Marcone would notice somebody else’s goons guarding his building, and at that point, you know. Kill everyone. Because that is the way of scary mobsters.

When you got to the stage where _Harry_ thought somebody was being reckless, that was some dire recklessness.

At any rate, the guards were all discount goons, disposable—no doubt brought in with bags over their heads, and ignorant of any valuable information. Lucky. It meant that even though Harry’s team was outnumbered, say, ten to one, he still wasn’t expecting much trouble clearing the building.

As it happened, there was even less trouble than he’d planned for. He was going to have to mark this day on his calendar, because damn, that was _never_ how his life went.

The thing was, Harry didn’t like to fight. He could see how people might get confused about this, what with the way he got into fights with everyone and everything all the frigging time, but he didn’t do it for fun. He did it for the sake of justice, or at least because he was really annoyed and needed to get it out of his system somehow.

Gard and Ed, on the other hand, obviously fought for the pure love of fighting. And they tore through those poor goons like they were cardboard cutouts.

Gard, fine. It made sense: she was a freaking Valkyrie. Seeing her all bloodthirsty and gleeful as she threw goons into walls and out of windows was, while slightly alarming, not a surprise. Harry was just glad Marcone had talked her into maiming rather than murder. (Corpses on his property, liability issues, et cetera.)

Ed, though. Harry hadn’t seen Ed coming, because Ed hadn’t given the impression that he was a straight-up child ninja with rage issues until this moment. But there it was. Ed was vicious, precise, and took advantage of everything in his environment—walls, rafters, rocks, spare goons—and all while bounding around at high speeds like gravity didn’t properly apply to him. As Harry watched, Ed leapfrogged over the head of one goon in order to kick the one behind him in the face, bowling both that guy and the goon behind _him_ over backward onto a pile of steel pipes. So two goons down, plus steel pipes everywhere and tripping up everyone except Ed, who was somehow up in the rafters again. Just a lot of bang for the buck, there. Harry seriously had to wonder what kind of inventive sadist had trained the kid.

All this was making Harry feel a little surplus to requirements, so he absently threw a _Forzare_ at a couple goons and knocked them out against the nearest wall. Gard gave him a patronizing smirk in passing, which Harry did not appreciate. Some people found him extremely scary! It wasn’t fair to hold him up to the standards of a Valkyrie and an alien ninja…kid.

Yeah, no. No, that didn’t make him feel any better.

In the end, every last goon was rendered unconscious, tied up, and piled in an alleyway nearby (though not near enough to be caught in any hypothetical future explosions) in under half an hour. And they were looking pretty rough, it had to be said. Harry almost felt bad for them. Poor goons. Next best thing to innocent bystanders, really.

Gard and Ed were untroubled by any such considerations, and had already efficiently moved on to the next item of business. Which was blowing stuff up. Harry liked to think of himself as pretty awesome at blowing stuff up, but he had to admit he’d never tried to do it with any degree of precision, and precision was what Gard and Ed were all about.

So it’s arson when you burn a building down, but what’s it called when you blow a building up? That’s what Harry wondered as he watched two battle fanatics first enthusiastically plot out the best way to explode a place, and then put that plotting into practice. It was obviously a crime, and there had to be a name for it, but Harry couldn’t decide what it would be. Criminal demolition?

He asked Ed, who scowled and started rattling off a bunch of Latin root variants, before eventually shrugging and admitting, with apparent self-directed resentment, that he didn’t know. _That_ brought up new and interesting questions about how exactly the translation function was working during this universe-hopping adventure, but it didn’t answer Harry’s initial question. So he asked Gard. Who completely ignored the question, because no one ever appreciated Harry’s efforts to better himself.

“Make yourself useful, wizard,” was all she said, while Ed cheerfully shoved Harry to what he considered a safe distance from the warehouse. “Give us fire.”

“Yeah, pyro guy,” Ed agreed. “We all know how you _love_ fire.” And just as Harry was starting to feel a bit offended, Ed added, “And, hey, whether this works or not, thanks for being so cool about everything. Your planet sucks, and we’d have been totally stuck here without you, so. Yeah. Thanks.”

“…You’re welcome,” Harry said, trying to work out whether he should be insulted on behalf of his planet. “Good luck overthrowing the government. And tell Al I said bye, and also that he’s my favorite alien.”

“Screw you, Dresden,” Ed shot back with a laugh, then nodded permission with a completely wild grin.

Harry grinned back and shouted, “ _Fuego_ ,” aiming at the bundle of fuses Gard had pointed out.

Turned out Gard and Ed were just as good at criminal demolition(?) as Harry’d been afraid they were, because the whole warehouse went up like an ammo dump.

“Awesome,” Ed said decisively, staring at the fiery destruction. It was the last thing he said before he faded slowly out to weird transparency, then eventually vanished with a snap. He didn’t actually leave his grin hanging in the air for a few seconds after he was gone, but it distinctly had that feel to it.

Harry stared at Ed’s last known location for a while, reasonably sure it had all worked out as planned, but still a little sad. Sure, their presence had been potentially fatally disrupting the entire universe and whatnot, but Ed and Al had been fun to have around.

He shook himself out of it, eventually, remembering that he was standing next to a burning building and could, in fact, hear sirens. Gard, less sentimental, was already long gone. Like Harry needed to be, because if Murphy had to arrest him for something she’d explicitly ordered him not to do one more time, she might pop an artery in her brain from sheer force of rage. And Harry refused to lose Ed, Al, _and_ Murphy all in the same day.

He made it about three blocks before Murphy pulled him over. She was wise to his tricks.

“Dresden,” was all she said, but it was really impressive how much murder she could imply with that one word. She was looming in an ominous way, too, but she hadn’t pulled her gun on him yet, and he was willing to take what he could get.

“Murphy!” he replied brightly. “Fancy meeting you here!”

“Funny. By chance, do you remember when I told you not to blow up any buildings in my city? Because, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but there’s a blown up building _right there_. And who do I find a few blocks away but _you_.”

“Ah.” Harry held up a finger. “ _I_ did not blow that building up.”

“So Ed blew it up while you watched. And you know what? That means I can still perfectly legally haul your ass in.”

“You know that never ends well, Murph. I’m just too popular for jail.”

Her hand drifted back and settled on her gun. Harry hastily started explaining better. Explaining for his life, as it were. “Anyway, that building belonged to Marcone, and technically Marcone blew it up. If he doesn’t try to collect on the insurance, I feel like this was barely illegal. Nobody got hurt. No damage to surrounding structures.” True fact—Gard and Ed were demolition pros. So troubling. “And you have non-magical shady characters to interrogate now! Totally a win, Murph.”

“Does this mean your aliens are back home, then?” Murphy asked. And so calmly, too. If she hadn’t been clutching her gun so hard her knuckles were white, she could have faked coolness.

“Sure,” Harry said, surreptitiously checking that the gun’s safety was still on.

Murphy was quiet for a long time, which generally boded ill. “ _Sure?_ ” she repeated.

“I mean, I don’t see why not,” Harry clarified blithely.

“Dresden, were you aware that it’s very difficult to convict a police officer of murder?”

“But who would you call the next time an alien turned up? You’d miss me, Murph!”

Murphy closed her eyes gritted her teeth. Safety was still on, though. “Go away, Dresden,” she said. “Just go away for a while.”

Harry smiled and eased the Beetle forward very gently, sort of the automobile equivalent of backing away slowly with your hands in the air. And he got all the way out of range without any fresh bullet holes anywhere.

Ed the alien hadn’t known what he was talking about—Murphy was a model of restraint.

* * *

Thomas was back in the apartment when Harry got there. In the apartment and cooking, no less. The day was looking up.

Well, sort of. Thomas was still a vaguely terrible cook, and was probably only cooking in the first place out of some weird fit of guilt related to whatever he’d spent his evening doing, but Harry was choosing to ignore all that for the moment.

“Al abruptly disappeared, so I assume everybody went home and the world is saved?” Thomas called from the kitchen.

“I assume that also,” Harry agreed. “I’m pretty sure. Ninety-five percent sure. Not that we caught any of the big bosses, because that would be way too easy. No, they’ll come back later and try to kill us all again in their own time, I’m sure.”

Thomas rolled his eyes. “Welcome home, anyway. I got bored waiting for you and made pasta. You should eat to build up your strength before I tell you about _my_ day. Also before you talk to Bob, because Bob totally bonded with Al, and now he’s depressed.”

“Wow, my life has the best problems. And all I get for saving the world is pasta? Really? Pasta?”

“You get pasta for being ninety-five percent sure you saved the world. If you were actually sure, you’d get pasta and one of Mac’s microbrews.”

“I’ll try harder next time,” Harry decided, walking across the living room and getting charged into by Mister.

He was home, reasonably sure the world wasn’t actively ending, and had gotten to meet some cool aliens. It was possibly a little pathetic, yes, but he was going to go ahead and consider this one of his better days.


End file.
